Chapter 1 - The Plate
The plate hit my forehead before I saw Marissa throw it.
For half a second, the dining room vanished behind a white flash.
Then ceramic shattered against the wall, and something warm ran into my eyebrow.
I put my fingers to my face.
They came away red.
“How dare you say no to my mother, you selfish old bat!” Marissa screamed.
My grandson Tyler stood three feet away, staring at the broken plate.
He was thirty-one years old, but in that moment he looked exactly like the frightened little boy I used to hold after thunderstorms.
“Grandma, please,” he whispered.
“Everybody needs to calm down.”
I was seventy-two, bleeding onto my good tablecloth, and he was asking everybody to calm down.
Not his wife.
Everybody.
Marcus, Marissa’s father, snapped shut the leather folder containing his seven-page “family property proposal.”
Diane, her mother, hurried to cradle Marissa’s shoulders.
Nobody came to me.
“You could have prevented this,” Diane said, looking at the blood on my face as if I had spilled gravy.
I picked up a napkin and pressed it against my forehead.
Behind the pain came an unexpected clarity.
My other hand stayed in my cardigan pocket, where I pressed the silent alert button Nora had insisted I carry after Marcus first threatened me.
These people weren't shocked that Marissa had hurt me.
They were shocked that hurting me hadn't changed my answer.
“No,” I said again.
“The rental house is not yours.”
Marissa took a step toward me.
Tyler finally moved between us.
“You're going to regret this,” Marcus muttered.
I looked at the folder under his arm, then at all four of them.
“You don't know what I already did.”
Marcus's mouth went slack.
Diane stopped stroking her daughter's hair.
Tyler swallowed.
“Grandma,” he said, “what did you do?”
Three hard blows rattled my front door.
A man's voice rang through the house.
“Police! Open up!”
Marissa stared at me.
“You called them?”
I lowered the bloody napkin.
May you like
“Yes,” I said.
“But that isn't the part you should be afraid of.”
